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They transferred her to the lower healers’ wing that evening. And thankfully, that was where she found Julen still recovering.

He sat against a wall of cushions, his injured side carefully supported and his side still bound in linen, his face still pale and weak beneath the lamplight. His eyes widened when he saw her, then narrowed with anger.

“Gods, Maia. Selinne said you were reassigned,” he said, his gaze dropping to her bandaged hands and strapped shoulder. “She didn’t say you were torn apart.”

She managed a weak smile. “Ah, well, you should see the other…”

The joke died and tailed off before it fully reached her lips.

Julen swore softly, then paused. “He came looking for you here, you know.”

“Who?” she asked, too quickly, as though the question hadn’t already answered itself in her chest before he finished his sentence.

Julen gave her a look that told her exactly how well her performance had landed. “Caelith,” he said anyway, letting her have the pretence. “Around midday, before anyone knew what had happened. He argued with the healers. With some of the other Umbralyn. I’ve never seen him like that. It was like he knew what had happened before it even happened.”

Maia closed her eyes, forcing any anger or tears back.

“Have you managed to see him yet?” Julen asked.

“He told me to stay away from him, Julen,” she whispered. “And I listened. So I don’t know what he expected to see, or to do.”

Julen’s expression softened. “To be honest with you, Maia, he looked like a man who knew he was too late.”

She sighed and didn’t try to stop the tears this time.

***

Night claimed the city.

Even from her bed, Maia felt the Fracture’s pulse. It was stronger now, unrestrained, humming through the stone like something newly unmoored. The stone beneath the healers’ wing vibrated faintly, as if searching for something that was no longer where it should be.

Or someone.

Beyond the wing, Umbralyn patrols moved openly through the streets, their chains gone. Their presence was heavier now, sharper, no longer restrained by pretence or balance. Power walked beside them, unhidden. The city was so quiet, but it was not peaceful.

She stared at her bandaged hands, remembering how the shards had answered her fear. But also how differently they had sung when Caelith stood beside her. How steady they had been then. How whole.

I will not let them use you.

But they had. The memory struck her again and she grimaced at the thought. They hadn’t been testing the shards. They hadn’t even been testing her.

They had been testing him.

She saw it now with horrible understanding: the reassignment, the new Umbralyn, the isolation, the creature released at precisely the moment she was most vulnerable. Every piece of it was designed not to measure what she could do, but to measure what happened to him when she was in danger.

Testing the bond. Proving that whatever connected them was real, and that it could be used. Proving that whatever had happened with the Hollow Wraith could not have been achieved by a human alone.

And she had been the instrument that gave them certainty.

The Fracture pulsed again beneath the city, deeper this time, uneven. Sharper and more targeted, as if a pressure point had been struck.

Something in Maia’s chest simply stopped, all at once: Caelith was gone.

She could feel the gap he left behind like a missing note in a chord. A cold, suffocating fear wrapped around her body.

Something was happening to him. And she could do nothing to stop it.

Whatever the Umbralyn were preparing for, it had already begun. And this time, she was not going to wait to be told what to do about it.